The robots that ate Pittsburgh

The more you read about self-driving cars, the more your head spins over effects like this. Mayor Peduto says he envisions self-driving as a ?last-mile and first-mile? technology connecting car-less citizens with public transit. It sounds like, for all his techno-Utopian bravado, he is being careful not to set off the bus drivers? union. City buses are surely among the settings in which it is easiest to imagine self-driving tech being implemented. The Uber robo-cabs in Pittsburgh will be chaperoned by human monitors at first to guarantee safety, and that may be the future of the human city-bus driver. Instead of trained operators for buses, we will have flight attendant types to assist disabled users and provide security.

If your question is, ?Why hasn?t the insurance industry started preparing for this?? you should check Bloomberg News, which reported Sunday that big insurers agree: personal auto insurance is, as a major revenue source, on the road to extinction. An analyst for Aon plc said he expected a drop in its American business of 20 per cent by 2035; another spokesman for the Munich Re group said the same thing, but gave figures of 25 per cent and 2030. These seem like polite conservative estimates from a business predicated on caution. Aon?s man says he anticipates ?mov(ing) the business mix to fleet products and commercial lines,? but how sure are we that self-driving cars won?t disrupt commercial transport sooner rather than later?